The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (29 page)

The French, of course, already had an image of America as the land of plain Quakers. Voltaire in his
Lettres philosophiques
(1754) had identified Pennsylvania with the Society of Friends, who were celebrated for their equality, pacifism, religious freedom, and, naturally, their absence of priests. It was as if nobody but Quakers lived in Pennsylvania. With three

Franklin as a Frenchman, engraving by François Martinet, 1773

articles on Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the Quakers, Diderot’s
Ency-clopédie
further contributed to this picture of Pennsylvania as the land of freedom, simplicity, and benevolence—an image that gradually was expanded to the New World in general.
⁴⁴

Many of the French
philosophes
like Voltaire were struggling to reform the
ancien régime,
and they turned the New World into a weapon in their struggle. America in their eyes came to stand for all that eighteenth-century France lacked—natural simplicity, social equality, religious freedom, and rustic enlightenment. Not that the reformers expected France to become like America. But they wanted to contrast this romantic image of the New World with the aristocratic corruption, priestly tyranny, and luxurious materialism they saw in the
ancien régime.
A popular debate that arose in France—over the issue of whether the climate of the New World was harmful to all living creatures and caused them to degenerate—was fed by these political concerns.
⁴⁵
With this issue in mind, many of the liberal reformers were eager to emphasize the positive qualities of America. Idealizing all that was different from the luxury and corruption they saw around them, many of the liberal French
philosophes
created “a Mirage in the West,” a countercultural image of America with which to criticize their own society.

In addition to the
philosophes,
many French aristocrats were themselves critics of their society, involved in what today we might call “radical chic.” They were eager to celebrate the new enlightened values of the eighteenth century, many of which were drawn from the classical republican writings of the ancient world. French nobles invoked classical antiquity and especially republican Rome to create imagined alternatives to the decadence of the
ancien régime.
Of course, they did not appreciate the explosive nature of the materials they were playing with. They sang songs in praise of liberty and republicanism, praised the spartan simplicity of the ancients, and extolled the republican equality of antiquity—all without any intention of actually destroying the monarchy on which their status as aristocrats depended. The French nobles applauded Beaumarchais’s
Le Barbier de Séville
and
Le Mariage de Figaro,
and later Mozart’s operatic version,
Le Nozze di Figaro,
with their celebration of egalitarian and anti-aristocratic values, without any sense they were contributing to their own demise. They flocked to Paris salons to ooh and aah over republican paintings such as Jacques-Louis David’s severe classical work
The Oath of the Horatii,
without foreseeing that they were eroding the values that made monarchy and their dominance possible. Many of these French aristocrats, such as the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a friend and admirer of Franklin, were passionate advocates of abolishing the very privileges to which they owed their positions and fortunes. They had no idea where all their radical chic would lead. In 1792 La Rochefoucauld was stoned to death by a frenzied revolutionary mob.
⁴⁶

Franklin was part of this radical chic from the beginning. The French aristocrats were prepared for Franklin, and they contributed greatly to the process of his Americanization. They helped to create Franklin the symbolic American. In this sense Franklin as the representative American belonged to France before he belonged to America itself. Because

The Oath of the Horatii,
by Jacques-Louis David, 1785

the French had a need of the symbol before the Americans did, they first began to create the images of Franklin that we today are familiar with— the Poor Richard moralist, the symbol of rustic democracy, and the simple backwoods philosopher.

He was the celebrated Dr. Franklin from the moment of his arrival in France in 1776. He was invited by a wealthy merchant, Jacques Donatien Le Ray, the Comte de Chaumont, to live in the garden pavilion of his elegant Hôtel de Valentinois located on his spacious estate in Passy, a small village outside of Paris on the route to Versailles. Unlike Franklin’s London home, which had been in the midst of the crowds and bustle of the city, this house was a half mile from Paris, sitting on a bluff with terraces leading down to the Seine, with views overlooking the city. Franklin enjoyed this suburban existence; when pressed by his colleagues to move into Paris in order to save money, he refused. Chaumont was a government

LEFT
:
Franklin, engraving by Augustin de Saint-Aubin, 1777 after a drawing by Charles-Nicholas Cochin

RIGHT
: To the Genius of Franklin,
etching by Marguerite Gerard, after a design by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1778

LEFT
:
Franklin, porcelain medallion, Sèvres ware, 1778

RIGHT
:
Franklin, French school, c. 1783

contractor. As an enthusiastic partisan of the United States, he refused any rent from Franklin, at least at first, and saw to it that the great man lived in relative luxury, serviced by a liveried staff of a half-dozen or more servants. In addition to the large formal gardens in which Franklin enjoyed walking, Franklin’s house had a lightning rod on the roof and a printing press in the basement. He spent his entire time in France quite comfortably ensconced in these plush surroundings. His food was ample and his wine cellar was well stocked with over a thousand bottles. He needed all these supplies, for he had a steady stream of guests.

The great man is “much sought after and entertained,” noted an observer, “not only by his learned colleagues, but by everyone who can gain access to him.” The nobility lionized him. They addressed him simply as “Doctor Franklin, as one would have addressed Plato or Socrates.”
⁴⁷
The French placed crowns upon his head at ceremonial occasions, wrote poems in his honor, and did their hair a la Franklin. Wherever he traveled in his carriage, crowds gathered and, amid acclamations, gave way to him in the most respectful manner, “an honour,” noted Silas Deane, “seldom paid to the first princes of the blood.” Only three weeks after his arrival, it was already the mode of the day, said another commentator, “for everyone to have an engraving of M. Franklin over the mantelpiece.”
⁴⁸
Indeed, the number of Franklin images that were produced is astonishing. His face appeared everywhere—on statues and prints and on medallions, snuffboxes, candy boxes, rings, clocks, vases, dishes, handkerchiefs, and pocketknives. Franklin told his daughter that the “incredible” numbers of images spread everywhere “have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.”
⁴⁹

Not only did Jean-Antoine Houdon and Jean-Jacques Caffiéri mold busts of Franklin, in marble, bronze, and plaster, but every artist, it seemed, wanted to do his portrait. Jean-Baptiste Greuze and J. F. de L’Hospital painted him, and Joseph-Siffred Duplessis did at least a dozen portraits of him (see pages 178-79). The Duplessis portrait of 1778 portrayed Franklin in a fur collar and was repeatedly engraved and copied by numerous other artists; it became the most widely recognizable image of Franklin.
⁵⁰
“I have at the request of friends,” Franklin complained, “sat so much and so often to painters and Statuaries, that I am perfectly sick of it.”
⁵¹
No man before Franklin, it has been suggested, ever had his likeness

LEFT
:
Franklin, bust by Jean-Jacques Caffiéri, 1777

RIGHT
:
Franklin, bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1778

LEFT
:
Franklin, by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, 1778

RIGHT
:
Franklin, by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1777